Qissa Khwani massacre, 23 April 1930

At a glance

• Date and place: 23 April 1930, the Kabuli Gate police station and the Qissa Khwani Bazaar of Peshawar. [2, 9]

• What happened: a crowd that had gathered after the arrest of local Congress leaders was run down by an armoured car and then fired on for hours. [2, 9]

• The count: the Government's figures in 1930 were about 20 and then 30 dead; the Congress inquiry proved 125 dead and said many more had been killed; the historian Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah puts the toll near 230; Bacha Khan and the Awami National Party say 200 to 400 or more. No count accepted by both sides exists. [2, 9, 10, 12]

• What Peshawar calls it: San Tees Shaheedan, the martyrs of 1930. [9]

• What came of it: the arrests and killings that followed brought the Khudai Khidmatgar into an alliance with the Indian National Congress. [1, 9]

The week before

In March and April 1930 Mohandas Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign spread across India, from the salt march that ended at Dandi on 6 April. [9] The North-West Frontier Province looked an unlikely place for it. The Frontier Congress had few members, Peshawar's urban politicians could not draw crowds from the villages, and the authorities left their first picketing alone. [9]

What the province did have was the Khudai Khidmatgar, the Servants of God, founded by Bacha Khan in November 1929 out of the Azad schools and the reform society he had started in 1921. [9] The Peshawar Congress leaders, among them Agha Lal Badshah, Maulana Abdur Rahim Popalzai and Ghulam Rabbani Sethi, decided to ask for his support. [9] On 5 April the liquor traders asked for fifteen days to sell their stock; the committee agreed, and picketing of the liquor shops of Peshawar was put off to 23 April. [2, 9]

At the annual meeting of the Azad school at Utmanzai on 19 and 20 April, Congress speakers asked the Khudai Khidmatgar to join them, and the volunteers pledged their support. [9] On 22 April a Congress deputation sent to inquire into the Frontier's special regulations was stopped at Attock and not allowed into the province. [2, 9] That day a procession ended in a public meeting at the Shahi Bagh, where the leaders said picketing would begin the next day. [9]

Arrests and the Kabuli Gate

The Government decided to arrest the leaders first. Shah quotes Olaf Caroe, then an officer in Peshawar, as reporting that the authorities also meant to take every leading Khudai Khidmatgar, to prevent unrest in the villages. [9] On the night of 22 April nine Congress and Naujawan Bharat Sabha leaders were taken to the Bala Hisar, and two more gave themselves up in the morning. [9] The Secretary of State for India told the House of Commons that the Peshawar outbreak followed the arrest of eleven local Congress leaders. [3]

Bacha Khan had been arrested before he reached the city. After the Utmanzai meeting he was on his way to Peshawar when he was stopped at Naki Thana and taken back to Charsadda, with Mian Ahmad Shah, Abdul Akbar Khan, Salar Sarfraz Khan and Haji Shah Nawaz Khan. [1] He wrote that the people of Naki Thana, angry that he had been arrested in their district, all became Khudai Khidmatgar on the spot. [1] At Charsadda thousands surrounded the lock-up, and he and his brother Dr Khan Sahib spoke to them; no violence followed. [1, 9] The next day the magistrate at Risalpur sentenced him to three years under the Frontier Crimes Regulation. [1]

In Peshawar, at about nine in the morning, the leaders were taken from the Congress office towards the Kabuli Gate police station. Shah writes that a crowd of perhaps eight hundred gathered, shouting for Gandhi and for revolution, and followed. The leaders asked the police sub-inspector to let them walk the rest of the way and surrender, and he agreed. The leaders went inside and the crowd began to disperse. [9]

The armoured car

Then an armoured car came at speed into the people in front of the police station. Shah says it gave no warning by horn or any other means, crushed twelve to fourteen people and killed seven on the spot. [9] The Congress inquiry found the same twelve to fourteen killed and wounded. [2] Shah says the Deputy Commissioner, H. A. Metcalf, alarmed at the size of the crowd, had called four armoured cars from the cantonment and that this was the first. [9]

The Government's account, issued as a communiqué on 6 May, was different. It said a mob had rescued two arrested leaders from the police, that Metcalf went to the gate with three armoured cars and was met by an officer hurt by a brickbat, that a British despatch rider had been knocked from his bicycle and run over, that Metcalf was knocked senseless by a brick, and that one armoured car was set on fire and its crew attacked. Metcalf then authorised the troops to fire. [2] In Parliament a member said a despatch rider named Bryant, of the 1st Armoured Car Company, Royal Tank Corps, had been killed by the mob; the Secretary of State replied that the Army Council regarded his death as attributable to service. [7]

The Congress inquiry, appointed by the Working Committee of the Congress and chaired by Vithalbhai Patel, answered point by point. It heard witnesses who said the rider had followed the first car at speed, collided with it as it reversed, and been crushed, and it noted that the blow-on-the-head account first appeared in a press note two weeks after the event. [2] It found that the people were unarmed: the communiqués of 23, 27 and 28 April did not say otherwise, and photographs taken that day show a crowd without sticks or axes. [2] On the burning car the Pashtun sources differ. Bacha Khan wrote that a young man set one of the cars on fire and that four burned. [1] Shah says someone from the crowd did so after the first car had run into the people. [9] The Congress inquiry, on the evidence of its witnesses, found that the car caught fire of itself after the firing began, and rejected the Government's story. It accepted that some people, seeing the dead and wounded, picked up pebbles and threw them at the car. [2]

The firing

Shah says some accounts put the beginning of the heavy firing at about eleven in the morning and its end at three in the afternoon, first from the armoured cars and then, on a larger scale, from troops as well. [9] The Congress inquiry found that it was not confined to the bazaar but went into side streets, lanes and balconies. [2]

Witnesses described it. Syed Amir Badshah, president of the Zamindars' Association of Peshawar, watched from an upper room and told the inquiry that anyone who appeared on a roof or balcony was shot at, that an officer ordered a bayonet charge on people trying to carry away the dead and wounded, and that he saw three closed lorries being loaded with bodies. [2, 9] Shah adds that Dr Khan Sahib reached the bazaar through the troops, set up a treatment room in the Khilafat office and treated the wounded when the government hospitals would not. [9] The dead included Hindus and Sikhs, who were cremated or buried by their own families and are remembered, Shah writes, as shuhada-i-Qissa Khwani, martyrs of Qissa Khwani, with no distinction of religion. [9] See Hindus and Sikhs of the Pashtun lands.

The Garhwalis

Shah, Bacha Khan and the Congress inquiry all record that Garhwali soldiers refused to fire on the crowd; Shah calls them the 2/18 Garhwal Regiment. [1, 2, 9] In his account they told their officers they had been recruited to guard India against foreign invaders, not to shoot unarmed countrymen. [9] The Congress inquiry said their sole ground was that the people in front of them were unarmed and peaceful. [2] Tendulkar prints words the men are said to have spoken at their court martial: "We will not shoot our unarmed brethren." [10]

The Government gave another reason for the troops' trouble. Its communiqué said the Garhwalis were hurt by iron rails, axes, poles and bamboos, that their commanding officer was struck in the face with a brick and that the crowd tried to snatch their rifles. [2] The Congress inquiry replied that the claim of weapons first appeared in a later communiqué and was an afterthought. [2]

The sentences are on the record in Parliament. Asked in June, the Secretary of State said the men had been tried for refusing to obey orders to proceed from their lines to the city. One was sentenced to transportation for life, one to fifteen years, and fifteen others to terms from ten years' transportation to three years' rigorous imprisonment. [5] Shah names Chander Singh as the man sentenced for life. [9] The battalion was withdrawn from Peshawar and replaced by a Gurkha battalion. [4]

How many died

The figures begin with the Government's. Its communiqué gave the death roll as about twenty, with about sixty wounded. [2] The official inquiry by two judges, Sir Shah Muhammad Sulaiman and H. R. Panckridge, put the dead at thirty and the wounded at thirty-three, according to Shah, who adds that the same report says this was not the final figure. [8, 9] Shah says the Frontier administration's other figure, about forty, has been repeated by many historians without checking. [9]

The Congress inquiry sat at Rawalpindi because it was not allowed into the province. It found 125 people proved dead and added that a much larger number must have been killed, since bodies were removed in lorries and the wounded did not come forward for fear of prosecution. [2] Shah, after what he calls a careful study of published and unpublished sources, puts the dead near 230 and the wounded above 500. [9] Bacha Khan said in a speech after his release that 200 to 250 were martyred in a minute of firing. [10] The Awami National Party's provincial president said in 2026 that more than 400 Khudai Khidmatgar and civilians were martyred. [12] Press reports of recent anniversaries give about 400 as the independent estimate against 179 as the official one, a figure that does not appear in the 1930 papers above. [11, 13]

For the Pashtun reading, the total is not the only question. Shah observes that the bazaar has many ways in and out, that no warning shots were fired, that many bodies had more than one bullet wound and that the firing went on for hours. He concludes that the troops were told to kill the crowd. [9] The Congress inquiry reached its own finding in similar words: the firing was meant to strike terror. [2]

What happened next

On the night of 25 April the authorities withdrew the troops and the usual police from Peshawar. Congress and Khilafat volunteers guarded the gates and streets until the police returned. [2, 9] The Chief Commissioner, Sir Norman Bolton, was recalled and Sir Courtney Latimer replaced him. [9] People tried to rename the bazaar Bazaar-i-Shahidan, the martyrs' bazaar, and the Kabuli Gate Khooni Darwaza, the bloody gate. The old names came back after a few days. [9]

On 4 May troops reoccupied the city before dawn. The Congress committee and the Naujawan Bharat Sabha were declared unlawful and their offices raided. [2, 9] The Government's communiqué gave as a reason that the Congress was in correspondence with the Haji of Turangzai, who was raising a lashkar to enter the Peshawar district. [2] Shah writes that the Haji did gather his followers in Mohmand country; see the Haji Sahib of Turangzai. [9]

On 31 May there was a second shooting. Bacha Khan wrote that it began with the killing of two children of Sardar Ganga Singh, whose mother was wounded. [1] Parliament was told that a soldier's rifle went off by accident while he was cleaning it at the Kabuli Gate and killed two children, and that the lance-corporal was sentenced to eighteen months. [6] Shah writes that thirty-six soldiers then fired on the children's funeral procession and killed twelve people; Tendulkar, quoting the Congress inquiry, says at least ten were killed and twenty-two wounded. [9, 10]

The villages were next. On 13 May Utmanzai was surrounded at three in the morning, according to an eyewitness statement in the Congress report as printed by Tendulkar. [10] Shah describes grain scattered and soaked in kerosene, hujras burnt, people beaten and stripped, and a certificate from Dr Khan Sahib on eighty Khudai Khidmatgar from Charsadda beaten with lathis at a liquor shop. [9] At Takkar in Mardan on 26 to 28 May a police officer named Murphy was killed during a procession of villagers following their arrested leaders towards Mardan; Shah and the local elders quoted by Dawn tell it differently, and both say troops then entered the village and hujras were burnt. Shah says about twenty died. [9, 14] A Pashto book published in Afghanistan, cited by Dawn, gives 70 killed and 150 wounded, and the Takkar martyrs are remembered each 28 May. [14] On 24 August at Spin Tangi in Bannu, Shah says, more than seventy were killed at a Waziri-led protest. [9]

The volunteers did not strike back. Shah writes that enrolment in the Khudai Khidmatgar rose above a hundred thousand, and that the new Chief Commissioner, Sir Steuart Pears, told the Viceroy that three tahsils of Peshawar district were overrun by bands of Red Shirts. [9] In a speech Tendulkar prints, Bacha Khan said of the British: "You can conquer the Pathan community by words of love, but you cannot conquer it through violence." [10]

An alliance forced by repression

Shah writes that the Frontier administration meant to call the Khudai Khidmatgar agents of the Bolsheviks. Two leaders still free, Mian Jaffar Shah and Mian Abdullah Shah, went to Bacha Khan in Gujrat jail and then approached Muslim leaders of the Punjab and Delhi, who said they could not help. The Congress welcomed the Khudai Khidmatgar and let them keep a separate identity. [9] In the speech Tendulkar prints, Bacha Khan said the Muslim League and the Muslim Conference would not help and that the Congress said "We are with you." [10] Some of his colleagues objected that the Pashtuns would lose their identity in a Hindu-dominated party. He answered by pointing to the Prophet's agreements with other peoples at Medina. [9]

On 16 October 1930 Jawaharlal Nehru sent the Frontier a message: "Men and women of the Frontier, you have written a golden page in Indian history!" [9] Shah writes that the alliance lasted until Partition. For what followed, see Partition and the 1947 referendum and Babra, 1948, where a Pakistani provincial government fired on the same movement.

How it is remembered

Poets took up the day. Abdul Malik Fida, whose poem on Babra is better known, wrote of the bazaar as a slaughterhouse; see Abdul Malik Fida and the Khudai Khidmatgar poets. Shah prints these lines from his Diwan (Peshawar, 1957) with an English translation, and notes that the poets gave the day no communal colour:

Dasey toye karhi hecha nadi da chargano weeney

Laka toye karhi dee Angrez da mazloomano weeney

No one ever spilled the blood of chickens so pitilessly as the English spilled the blood of innocent people that day (after Shah's translation). [9]

In 2019 members of the Gandhara Hindko Board walked from the Bazaar-i-Misgaraan to the Yadgar-i-Shaheedan, two monuments in the Qissa Khwani, laid wreaths and offered fateha, and asked the government to mark the day officially. [11] In 2026 the Awami National Party's provincial president marked the 96th anniversary with a statement calling the day an unforgettable chapter in the region's history. [12] A 260-page book on the massacre by Aftab Iqbal Bano, published in 2026, examines six inquiry reports and argues that the official ones were dishonest and the reports of political parties based on fact. [13]

Shah writes that outside the province the day received far less attention than Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, where more than three hundred people were killed; by his count it was second only to Jallianwala Bagh in lives lost. [9]